Saturday, December 9, 2006

The Best Electronic Coyote Call

Ozu Yasujiro Ozu

[Fact Ozu Site Image made by CARC, national stage, with support from the National Centre for Cinematography (CNC) devices dedicated to national leadership of young people, initiated by the Ministry of Culture and Communications (CNC, DRAC) with the Ministries of National Education, Youth and Sports, the City and local authorities.]


Born December 12, 1903 in Tokyo of a merchant family ( commercial fertilizer), Yasujiro Ozu spent his childhood in Matsusaka, near the city of Nagoya, where he discovered cinema through western movies as Quo Vadis? (E. Guazzoni, 1912), Civilization (Ince Thomas Harper, 1916), or those of David Wark Griffith, Chaplin, FW Murnau, Josef von Sternberg and Ernst Lubitsch above, as well as film actors and s' actresses such as William S. Hart, Pearl White, Lillian Gish.

One of the first stars of Japanese cinema, Matsunosuke Onoe, sparked his interest in film, but he could barely remember three Japanese films at the age of twenty. During the Second World War, he could see Citizen Kane (O. Welles), the movie that impressed him most, The Grapes of Wrath , Stagecoach, How Green Was My Valley, Tobacco Road (J. Ford), Rebecca (A. Hitchcock), The Grand Passage (K . Vidor) and the films of William Wyler who then enthralled by French critics. And fully justified the decision of the American critic David Bordwell makes Ozu's "most cinematic of the great filmmakers before the New Wave," as he is regarded in his country as "the most Japanese of Japanese filmmakers." They forget that Yasujiro Ozu was born in the thirtieth year the Meiji period of openness and modernization of Japan and the Japanese intellectual youth is especially in this modern Western culture.

After failing the entrance exam to the business school in Kobe, between Ozu in 1923, against the wishes of his father but on the recommendation of an uncle understanding, the fledgling company Shochiku, Tokyo . He chooses to work specifically with Tadamoto Ookubo, prolific filmmaker specializing in comedies "no sense" inspired by the American burlesque. We know little in France Much of the work of Ozu's silent, for the most part disappeared, and neglect the farcical aspect of his cinema. Comic and tragic, derision and compunction, alertness and hieratic, triviality and spirituality are still to Ozu both sides of the same phenomenon, and the triviality, often at the heart of the most tragic situations.

Ozu begins in an easier kind held in 1927, with a historical film, the taxonomy of Japanese cinema calls "jidai-geki (period film about a period before the Meiji era), The Sabre penance. There he met one who will its principal screenwriter Kogo Noda. The section of "jidai-geki" moved to Kyoto, Ozu prefers to stay in Tokyo (and near his mother), he became a specialist in "Gendai-geki (films whose subject relates to the contemporary period), and especially" shomin-geki, "featuring the" little people ", particularly the world of office workers.

From that moment Yasojiru Ozu's life coincides with his work. Only the death of his father in 1934 appears to play an emotional role, but it worked long in the distant capital Ozu only joined in 1923. He lived mostly with his mother to death of it in 1962. We know of no female relationship, despite a brief affair with a geisha and a marriage proposal made to an actress ... It will also work with practically all his life (with the exception of three films in the last period) for the same studio, the idea of changing the employer who apparently never touched. Its only characteristic also shared by his screenwriter Noda, is a penchant for alcohol. On the last day of writing the script for Tokyo Story, this is his diary entry: "Done. 103 days , 43 bottles of sake. "

After being a director of several comedies, especially ludicrous is the late 20's he can make films that he considers more personal ( I graduated, but ... and The Life of an office worker ), closer to its aspirations and "shomin-geki" dark side of his earlier comedies.

The global economic crisis allows him, with his scriptwriter Noda, pushing in this direction with films such as The Choir Tokyo (1931) and Tokyo Kids (1931), descriptions ironic painful situations (unemployment, submission to the boss). It was at this period that systematized a stylistic characteristics of cinema of Ozu, the low position of the camera (up to tatami ", it was wont to say).

Having long resisted talking cinema, Ozu achieves An only son (1936), one of his darkest films: a complete misunderstanding between mother and son. Her work is tinged with more of that tone in the cultural tradition known as the Japanese "mono no aware", derived from Zen Buddhism, meaning both celebration and the renunciation of worldly things, a kind of serene sadness. After spending two years in the army in China, as a result of censorship, Ozu made films conform to the ideology of national unity without slipping into propaganda, as He was a father . (1942). After the war and six years of inactivity, it is, after 1949, with films like Late Spring (1949) or early Summer (1951) he found his fame and writer Noda. It becomes a filmmaker confirmed his country and cover price. It was in 1959 the first filmmaker to come to the National Academy of Fine Arts. This earned him then to be considered by the younger generation of Japanese cinema as a filmmaker academic, reactionary and conformist.

In early 1963, just months after completing his fifty-third film, The Taste of Sake , Yasujiro Ozu felt the first attacks of lung cancer will win on Dec. 12, the day his sixtieth birthday.


[Wikipedia] His tomb is inscribed with the single character 无 "mu" (Pronounced soft), a Chinese philosophical term that is usually translated as "nothingness", "vacuum".

careful though not to see the negative west of absence, disappearance, but rather a more positive direction East, which is the idea of becoming one with the universe, to blend into our surroundings . Indeed difficult to imagine a man so humanistic so enamored of life for eternity on a negative symbol on his headstone.

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